New UK leader aims for stability
LONDON — Rishi Sunak took over as Britain’s prime minister on Tuesday, the third in seven weeks, hoping to slow the revolving door at No. 10 Downing St. and restore stability to a government in turmoil.
But as he assembled a Cabinet and began to confront a grave economic crisis,
Sunak faced formidable political challenges, for which analysts said his seven-year career in national politics had not fully prepared him. The swift, truncated nature of his election may further complicate his task.
Having been elected with the votes of some 200 Conservative Party lawmakers, but not the party’s rank-and-file members, Sunak could have trouble claiming a mandate to lead a deeply fractured party, let alone the whole country. With his government forced into spending cuts and tax increases, he will have few resources with which to reward either his lawmakers or the public.
“He’s inheriting a divided party with a large number of Conservative MPs and members who believe he has no legitimate mandate,” said Matthew Goodwin, a professor of politics at the University of Kent. “That’s compounded by the fact that the party is in a free-fall and it’s not clear it has a parachute.”
And yet, on a day of nowfamiliar rituals, as Sunak, the fifth prime minister in six years, traveled to Buckingham Palace to be anointed by King Charles III, there was also a calm in British politics — something that had been missing since Boris Johnson’s chaotic departure this past summer.
Much of that owed to the 42-year-old prime minister himself: His well-received address to the nation Tuesday showed a degree of political awareness, conceding the mistakes of his predecessor, Liz Truss, and promising improvement, while also reaching out to her and Johnson.
“I will place economic stability and confidence at the heart of this government’s agenda,” a somber and solitary Sunak said on Downing Street, after returning from the palace. “This will mean difficult decisions to come.”
His decision to appear there without his wife or daughters, and to dispense with the cheering staff members that greeted Truss last month, lent his arrival a brisk, businesslike tone. It also underlined the contrast between Sunak and his predecessor, which he said would extend beyond optics.
A former chancellor of the Exchequer, Sunak is expected to pull Britain back to more mainstream policies after Truss’ experiment in trickle-down economics, which rattled financial markets and badly damaged Britain’s fiscal reputation.
“Mistakes were made,” Sunak said. “Not borne of ill will or bad intentions. Quite the opposite, in fact. But mistakes, nonetheless. And I have been elected as leader of my party, and your prime minister, in part, to fix them.”
Sunak quickly set about selecting a Cabinet remarkable for its familiar faces. He retained Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor whom Truss installed after ousting Kwasi Kwarteng, the architect of ill-fated tax cuts. Hunt, who has soothed the markets, is scheduled to present a more detailed fiscal plan on Oct. 31.
Sunak also kept on Ben Wallace as defense secretary and James Cleverly as foreign secretary, even though both had backed Johnson over him in the leadership race. And he retained Penny Mordaunt, who mounted a spirited challenge to him in that contest, as leader of the House of Commons.
It was a striking contrast to Truss, whose Cabinet consisted almost entirely of people who had backed her for leader, and it seemed to signal a recognition by Sunak that he could not succeed by drawing dividing lines in the party.
Most conspicuously, Sunak reappointed Suella Braverman as home secretary, a job she had been forced out of only a week ago, ostensibly because she breached security rules. Her appointment was a gesture to the Conservative Party’s right flank: Braverman is a hard-liner who wants to cut immigration numbers. She said her “dream” was to see flights deporting asylum-seekers from Britain to Rwanda.
Sunak did reward some loyalists, naming Dominic Raab, who campaigned faithfully for him, as deputy prime minister and justice minister, posts he held under Johnson.
Truss’ misfires have made Sunak’s job even more difficult. Britain’s straitened public finances and its higher borrowing costs — a consequence, in part, of rising interest rates in reaction to her policies — will require painful spending cuts. That will further test Sunak’s political skills. Last summer, he struggled to sell his tough-love message to party members, who preferred Truss’s supply-side remedies.
“The ideological riddle that Sunak has to try to solve is how the Conservative Party, amid a profound and prolonged economic crisis, can reconnect with the voters it attracted after Brexit,” Goodwin said.
Sunak did reappoint Michael Gove, a seasoned minister, to a post overseeing efforts to “level up” struggling cities in the Midlands and north of England with more prosperous London. That is important to retaining working-class voters who propelled the Conservatives to their landslide general election victory in 2019.
As chancellor, Sunak was lionized when he doled out billions of pounds to people who had lost their jobs because of the coronavirus pandemic. He sponsored another good-news program, “Eat Out to Help Out,” which subsidized meals at restaurants to revive the industry after lockdowns.
But when it came to withdrawing those benefits and raising taxes, Sunak’s reputation unsurprisingly suffered. During his campaign against Truss, he struggled to stick to his message of fiscal conservatism. Under pressure from her promises of tax cuts, he said he would temporarily suspend the value-added tax, a sales tax, on energy bills — something that he had earlier rejected.
“He doesn’t have a lot of what I’d call trench-fighting experience,” said Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London. “His progress through the party has been so rapid that he hasn’t spent years forging friendships with colleagues who’ve got his back come what may.”
Political analysts said the sheer magnitude of Truss’ failure was Sunak’s biggest asset. The Conservatives are trailing Labour by more than 30 percentage points in some polls. Even those who ardently opposed Sunak recognize that he is likely their last hope of avoiding a general election rout that would sweep hundreds of Conservative lawmakers out of their seats.
“His MPs have looked over the edge of the precipice and know that, unless they get behind the guy, who is basically their last chance, they’re heading for a huge fall,” Bale said. “Basically, it’s Rishi or bust.”